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Benchmarks: Gamer

Reducing the visual quality to the “gamer” preset helped improving performance a lot. At 1440x900 the GeForce GTX 280 is now 44% faster, rendering an average of 46fps.

Interestingly, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 was just 10% faster and fell back to the fourth place. The GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ were both quicker than the dual-GPU monster. Still, the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which was the third fastest graphics card tested, rendered just 36fps on average.

Increasing the resolution to 1680x1050 allowed the Radeon HD 4870 X2 to claw its way back towards the top, overtaking the GeForce 9800 GTX+ by just 1fps.

The GeForce GTX 280 remained the fastest graphics card tested, averaging 40fps. The GeForce GTX 260 came second with 36fps, followed by the Radeon HD 4870 X2 which managed to average 31fps.

The lower-end graphics cards, such as the Radeon HD 3850 and GeForce 9600 GT, averaged about 18fps. Even the new GeForce 9800 GT, aka 8800 GT, managed 26fps using these modest quality settings.

Now at 1920x1200 using the “gamer” or high quality settings, the GeForce GTX 280 is able to render 36fps followed by the Radeon HD 4870 X2 which produced 32fps.

Again these average frame rates are really too low, making Crysis Warhead somewhat unplayable in many areas. At the very least you are going to require a GeForce GTX 280 or Radeon HD 4870 to run at this resolution using these quality settings.